New Here

[Franz Bazarov]

Hi!

Ex-UNIX sys admin/software engineer here.

Nowadays I'm a musician, and I run a self-designed recording studio in a small basement fallout shelter, where I live with all of my computers, books, and music gear.

I went the path of CP/M, Atari 8-Bit, Amiga 1000, early Linux, Prime, DEC, SGI systems, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, datacenters & supercomputing. Yeah, Micro$loth stuff too, gag.

Did a lot with 2D & 3D graphics, audio, VR, multimedia, AI and lots of cool tech along the way.

I'm a "grown-up" (ha) skatepunk & a multi-instrumentalist musician. Guitar is my fav. I do all aspects of audio engineering, production, composition, instrumentation... the whole bit.

Hopefully I'll get a Major label recording deal sometime within the next two years. Working hard on it. My music is heavily Jane's Addiction influenced.

As far as kit goes...if it has wires, then chances are that it's hooked up to something! My studio & living space resembles a NASA command & control station in a post apocalyptic sci-fi movie.

I'm Down & Out, meaning, my former career has been Downsized & Outsourced to oblivion by greedy scumsucking money hungry management twits, retarded hi-tech investors, marketing creeps, and all of the usual suspects that inhabit this post dot com horror-show of a world that we're left with.

I'm a Porsche 928S technical enthusiast, and still own two... however they now need parts that I can't afford. Sux. At one time I drove one of them on a double cross-country, from NYC to Oregon to coastal LA & back. I will never forget it, it was an incredible journey, in the perfect car for the trip. Black/Black leather... Bitchin!

I also enjoy sailing... thank GAWD I didn't buy two yachts, too... ha!

...Anyway...

I am very interested in helping the Amiga community to better the modern Amiga systems & OS variants. I've been with the Amiga since the Amigaworld Premiere issue, and have always kept tabs on it.

Recently, it seems that A LOT of progress has been made toward making the Amiga-variants into truly viable Alternative Computing platforms. I would like to help out in any way that I can.

I have always thought that the Amiga was one of the most innovative devices ever built, and now that I am completely free to choose my personal computing platform, Amiga is the Way of the Future for me.

Looking forward to helping everyone here to make Amiga tech get better & better!


Nice to meet you,

Franz Bazarov

[TCD]

Nice to meet you too Franz. Welcome to EAB
I hope you find some valuable project to attend to here and enjoy our community

@Zetr0
I really need you to write one of your welcome messages. I miss them

[Muzkat]

Welcome buddy, enjoy your stay.

[AmigaFriend]

Hey Mr. Mad Scientist, welcome to EAB.

You'll shortly notice that this community has some mad and brilliant minds lurking around here. So you'll feel pretty cosy discussing all sorts of awesome and crazy stuff.

Good luck with your projects and endeavours. Hope that you'll be a regular folk around here.

All the best,

X-Pect

[amigakit.com]

Welcome!

[gklinger]

Howyoudoinnodisrespectfuggedaboutit.

[Rebel-CD32]

Welcome! I'm curious to know which of the Amiga OS systems you're most interested in helping out with; OS3/68k, OS4/PPC, MorphOS/PPC or AROS/x86/68k/PPC ? There are certainly a lot of projects going on quietly for all these systems, and there are definitely areas they're all lacking in and need of some good new software.

[Adropac2]

...

[Franz Bazarov]

Originally Posted by Rebel-CD32

Welcome! I'm curious to know which of the Amiga OS systems you're most interested in helping out with; OS3/68k, OS4/PPC, MorphOS/PPC or AROS/x86/68k/PPC ? There are certainly a lot of projects going on quietly for all these systems, and there are definitely areas they're all lacking in and need of some good new software.

I have two 1000s & a 600, so, instead, I'm running WinUAE, and have plans to get UAE on my SGI Indigo2s. I'm really interested in Natami's future. I am ultra-psyched about the 800MHz Samantha (Sam440ep) motherboards. I like the looks of Icaros, and I'm interested in getting AROS running natively on one of my PCs.

My future plans involve a Sam440 & an Asus eee pc running AROS... if I had money to spare I would buy both today & start immediately.

Ha, if I had cash, I'd also buy a tricked out 3000, 4000, 3000T. 4000T, too! One day.

For the mean time, I'm getting acquainted with SAS C 6.50 on WinUAE, with my fav ed, CygnusEd, & re-reading all of my old Amazing Computing & Amigaworld magazines, and my manuals, to freshen my memory & get up to speed again with all of the potential Amiga capabilities.

I like that gcc & python are available under AROS. Once I can get it to boot correctly, I'll be living in it.

I'm pretty generalist with this tech, I don't intend to get too locked into any one fork, rather, I'd like to do stuff for all of the systems.

My main idea is to create a very modern DAW, and MIDI sequencing package, that can be ported to each of the Amiga variants easily. This will entail working out how to get the most from SAS & gcc, portability-wise.

The DAW that I have in mind will have the functionality of Cakewalk Sonar, but will include modern 3D GUI metaphors, and have some inspiration from Sun's "Looking Glass Project". I am also quite fond of SGIs "amesh" 3D OpenGL real-time spectrogram program, which has lineage back to the Fairlight CMI's "Page D" 3D waveform display.

I think that the unique capabilities of the Amiga could open up a whole new branch of ways to manipulate audio & MIDI data for music production... So that's basically where I'm going to go with it. I'm going to address the things that I don't like about Sonar, and build something better, and cooler to use.

I do music all week long, so I'm intimately familiar with what is needed in multi-track sequencing.

Python offers a lot of opportunities, since there is tons of pre-written audio & MIDI stuff available, as well as the Snack Toolkit, developed for TCL/TK. It will require a bit of messing around & testing stuff out, but as far as I can tell, developing on gcc in AROS then porting to SAS seems to be the way to go. This way I can sketch it out with gcc & Python, and re-implement it in SAS, so that all Amiga users benefit, and get a state of the art DAW.

That's my plan for now. I will be contributing systems-oriented info to the Natami Project, in parallel with my DAW project.

As I get further into the secrets of the Amiga, (after I complete the DAW), I will contribute system level software to the AROS project, since this project is open source, and will, in all likelihood have the greatest survivability rate in it's lifecycle, down the road.

I would like to help to make the AROS system multi-processor/multi-core aware, as I am a big fan of multiprocessing. ...but that won't be for some time, once I really know the ropes of the OS on that level.

I think that software development is the key to the Amiga's future right now (this year). We have the SAM400 available, and should all buy one to keep the company afloat, to ensure new hardware in the future... but as far as the everyday user... just learn C & make a utility... anything... When people see new software being written, it shows 'signs of life' ha!

Don't get me wrong, hardware is ultra important, but we need to BUY it (not just ogle it) to support the people doing it, so that it keeps coming out. Otherwise the company will just fold, like the others did. Let's not let that happen this time around!

Alrighty, enough typing for me, gotta get to work on this stuff!

[Slayer]

Perhaps you might enjoy other Amiga boards, more involved with the modern Amiga as well... EAB or English Emulation Board as I'd prefer to call it are staunch supporters of Emulation and Pre AmigaOne/SAM hardware.

Of course I have heaps of the prior and a few of the latter (already ordered my second SAM) but my focus is on the Modern Amiga... AmigaOS is not done and it's a good thing some of us still believe that...

As for buying a SAM? I wish they all would, but I think only a handful here would be able to rise to that occassion...

You sound like you have a lot of energy and a sensible outlook on life... good luck on finding your path :-D

[T_hairy_bootson]

Welcome aboard Franz.

[amiga]

Originally Posted by Franz Bazarov

...
I think that the unique capabilities of the Amiga
...

They WERE unique in 1985!

Welcome on EAB, BTW!

[Shoonay]

Hello and welcome to EAB Frank Bazar

[Franz Bazarov]

"Frank Bazar"... Ha, I guess that would be the Ellis Islandism of it.

= )


Actually, it's just a nod to Kafka & Turgenev.

I've seen some old references to a few ports of different versions of the TCL/TK programming language.

No links that work though.

Does anyone have a link for a fairly recent version?

TCL/TK (pronounced: "Tickle-Tick") is a great language to design & prototype applications. You can get full GUI programs up & running quickly in it, and it is totally cross-platform compatible with M$/Mac/GNU/UNIX.

The more recent versions allow for self-contained redistributable executables, by using what are called: "Starkits".

It isn't as popular as perl, Python, Lua, etc... but it is a very capable language, and it would be a cool thing to have on an Amiga. Lots & lots of code exists for it already.

You can have a fully functional graphics & sound app in about a tenth of the time that it takes in most other languages.

...& you can selectively 'build it out' with C, once you have your app set-up the way you want it. Very cool for sketching, or just knocking out something quickly.

For the most part, if you grew up on BASIC, you can pick up TCL/TK really quickly. Anyone who "Doesn't program anymore..." should try TCL/TK out, the Amiga scene would see a whole lot more apps very quickly if people did.

Sooo, a link to a recent build would be very useful for all of us.

Thanks in advance.

[gklinger]

Tickle? Bah. Real men only need awk and sed.

You really should try to get out to an expo. I think you'd have a blast...

[Franz Bazarov]

Ha! However, I don't know if anyone else would dig a DAW constructed via awk & sed.

= )


Funny concept, though!

When/where/how do I find out about these expos? The last Amiga Expo I went to was in NYC, back in 1993. Great vibe, great stuff... you never would of guessed that it was the Eve of Destruction for the Amiga, based on all of the cool 3rd party stuff that was coming out at the time.

I have a few other questions... I know that some version of GCC was available for the Amiga... is there a link for a fresh install? I have only run across the hardfile which has it pre-installed.

Also, was there ever a port of VRML to the Amiga? I know that it's obsolete, but it was a lightweight 3D technology, that could be recycled into a modern application GUI, so it would be useful, & very fast.

As I had mentioned, I'd like to incorporate some of the cool concepts from Sun's Project Looking Glass into a new Audio/MIDI media manipulation app for AmigaOS, so VRML just makes sense, regardless of it's ancient/vintage-status.

I saw that there was an OpenGL library, MESA... any links to a newish one?

& finally, an X11 install link would be quite handy.

Once I get a hold of all this stuff, I think that I'll put together a website or linked PDF with UNIXisms for Amiga, so that everything is available to everyone, all in one place.

The availability of this stuff would certainly make it a whole lot easier for a lot of new software to start coming out for AmigaOS.

From what I've been reading, a lot of people don't see a future in the OS, because there IS NO new software. If that changed radically, in short order, it would help to push the Amiga OS variants, and help us all to do new things under the OS that we choose.

Is there any kind of updated table that shows what C compilers have what functionality? Something like a comparison of gcc, SAS C, Dice C, Storm C, Aztec C, Lattice C... this would make it a lot easier for programmers to get involved at a serious level without wasting a whole lot of time experimenting with different compilers.

If there was a website that cross referenced the documentation to those compilers, it would be a whole lot easier to get code examples up and running quickly.

There are plenty of code examples out there, but they all use different, incompatible brands of compilers, and to make matters worse, different versions of different incompatible compilers! Ha!

There should be a site devoted to Amiga C example code, sorted by links to versions, documentation, and the actual compiler, when possible.

Well there is much work to be done. More coffee needed!

Glad to be here, glad to help out, and thanks to all above who have welcomed me!

I hope that I can do my part to make the AmigaOS variants a completely viable alternative to mainstream operating systems. I've got 20 Amiga programming books opened to different pages all over the place here, and I'm re-absorbing info in Ultra-Sponge-Mode...

= )

[gklinger]

Originally Posted by Franz Bazarov

When/where/how do I find out about these expos?

Oh geez, I thought I had mentioned them in my earlier post. Sorry about that. The upcoming one is the C4 Expo in Cincinnati and while it has a distinctly 8 bit flavour to it, there are usually lots of Amiga folks in attendance. There's also the Emergency Chicagoland Commodore Convention in September and the World of Commodore (Toronto) in December (the date for the 2009 show hasn't been set yet nor has the website been updated from last year's show). They aren't nearly as large as the expos back in the day but they're a lot of fun. I'll be at the World of Commodore (for sure) and I intend to make sure there is more Amiga content in 2009 than in previous years.